10 Favorite Books on Preaching

At a Providence Presbytery meeting earlier this month, a fellow minister and I discussed books about preaching. It reminded me of a former colleague’s request several years ago for a list of my favorite books on preaching.

In no particular order, my ten favorites are:

1. The Supremacy of God in Preaching, John Piper

2. The Art of Prophesying, William Perkins

3. Christ-Centered Preaching, Bryan Chapell

4. The Christian Ministry, Charles Bridges. My favorite book about the pastor and his work.

5. The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Hughes Oliphant Old. I believe there are now six volumes; I have read the first three.

6. Between Two Worlds, John Stott. This is the first evangelical book on preaching I read. In 1979 I heard Stott preach on Romans 1-3  at Urbana. His exemplary preaching persuaded me to become an expository preacher.

7. Sacred Rhetoric, Robert Lewis Dabney

8. Horae Homiletica, Charles Simeon. For 10 years I had access at the Gordon-Conwell library to these twenty-plus volumes of expanded preaching outlines. Since being introduced to him in Stott’s Between Two Worlds, Simeon has been one of my  ministerial heroes, and I’ve learned much about his preaching from three of his biographers, William Carus, Hugh Evan Hopkins, and Handley Moule.

9. Thoughts on Preaching, J.W. Alexander

10. Feed My Sheep, Don Kistler, general editor

So many other good books could be on this list. Older works by Broadus, Lloyd-Jones, Spurgeon, and Spring come to mind, as do more recent ones, especially T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Preach and Christopher Ash’s The Priority of Preaching.

For Christians who want to know what expository preaching is all about, start with Derek Thomas’s chapter “Expository Preaching” in Feed My Sheep.

What are your favorite books on preaching?